I don't fault the iPod, yes it has weak sonics, but in the 80's we all were listening to Sony Walkman's, how good was that sound? Pretty lame as I recall, but it kept us involved with music, and the iPod does this as well. Sure, not all iPod users will get into this hobby to any significant degree, but they are all potential high end geaks waiting to be released!

If you took 100 seriously hooked iPod people and exposed them to their music on a good system, uncompressed source, many of them would be floored, never realizing what they had been missing and likely would become interested. This is what I expect will happen, at least hope.

At least they are involved in the music, and that is the start of this hobby.....

While I am not a vinyl guy, I can say that I've heard some of the best CD players made A-B'd to excellent vinyl rigs and they can and do hold there own in a different way. The sound is smoother and more natural, my problem with the format (snap, crackle and pop as you said) is just that, you end up spending tons of time and energy, not to mention $$ to keep your records clean, the TT sort of by definition is finicky, so being a modern man, I prefer the ease and simplicity of digital audio.

Don't get me wrong, all my old vinyl is still stored and one day I will own a TT, my problem is I know how I am and my foray into vinyl will not be cheap as I am unwilling to accept less than exceptional in my system.

I guess I am saying I understand both sides of this coin, and for me it sits on the edge, slightly tilted to digital with a strong magnetism towards analog.....

That could certainly have been my mantra a few years ago until CD technologies finally improved to the point that I was willing to give up a tiny bit of that elusive airiness for the sheer pleasure of just hitting the remote for my 300 CD changer and being able to almost instantly enjoy nearly every song in my collection. Got to admit it's so much more convenient than the whole song & dance of carefully opening a vinyl sleeve, extracting the LP, opening the dustcover on the TT, placing the record on the platter, turning on the TT, cleaning the LP, lowering the arm, closing the dustcover, etc.

As regards the iPod, Gary Yacoubian, CEO of Myer-Emco in the metro DC area, made a rather long presentation at the PARA conference a couple of years ago about how retailers who weren't enthusiastically embracing this technology were missing out on a lot of nice sales (and not serving their customers well). They'd recently re-trained their sales staff to ask every customer who they encountered if they had an iPod. If they answered "no" they told them about the technology. If they answered "yes" they asked if they had it with them (over 50% did) and promptly put it into one of their upgrade "dock" offerings and proceeded to show them how much better their music could sound when played back through good electronics and speakers. End result? Their sales of docking stations and 2.1 speaker systems skyrocketed!